This is from a promo for the next SFBIG event and I have no idea what it means. Maybe someone out there can help me translate?

“Sure there are brands with VERY specific demographics they need to reach, but often, even with colossal wastage the online ad network is much more efficient. You get much better price per performance on networks. Why? Well, even if your creative performs better on the branded site, it will do so by about 20%-30% for the same creative; but you get between 3x to 30x better pricing on the network you do the math. Unfortunately most brands dont.”

- Sean Cummings, Director of Marketing, Ask.com

I’ll post some details shortly, but I’m doing some testing of the new Facebook advertising system. They seem to be very quick to take down ads that are against their guidelines… unfortunately they’re not so kind as to tell you what guideline you have violated, they leave it to you to determine:

This ad has been disabled and should not be run again on the site under any circumstances. Generally, we disable an ad if it violates our Terms of Service or Advertising Guidelines. Unfortunately we cannot provide you with the specific violations that have been deemed abusive. Please review our Terms and Guidelines if you have further questions.

Stay tuned for further details and results of this experiment…

The NY Times article from yesterday discussing a “Do Not Track List” being advocated by various consumer groups taps into what will become an increasingly sensitive issue. It already is, amongst privacy advocates, but not as certainly among the consumer population at large, yet. Today’s article mentions the FTC looking more closely at this issue. These groups are right to be scrutinizing some of the actions of firms looking to improve advertising targeting, because as I have sometimes mentioned on this blog there network-effect-style emergent dangers. With so much more information about us out there, these dangers are real: a single player can take somewhat-interesting partially-identifiable data about a person, and combine it (or if compromised, have someone else take that data and combine it) with other freely available data from online social networks, news stories and whatever - and who knows what they might discover.

I support efforts to create centralized “opt-out” mechanisms, and especially efforts to educate the consumer about these resources (supporting the stance that AOL wants to take here hopefully not in a preemptive tobacco-”you’re going to make me tell kids that the product I sell is bad for them”-soon so I should start doing it first because I own Advertising.com and Tacoda now-kind of way) but this debate is a different one from that around advertising annoyance.

The do-not-call list for telemarketers reduces the amount of telemarketing activities, it turns off ads that are annoying or intrusive. Contacting the DMA and paying your dollar to be taken off lists or working with other services to do so will also reduce the volume of attention-sapping junk, but the do-not-track list will not do that. It may actually make ads less relevant. But I cannot complain: because I still fear that unfortunately as it stands right now, with many players going after consumer data in a myriad of ways, the market will not accurately price the negative end of unbridled data aggregation until it is too late for us to do anything about it…

I came across VentureBeat’s coverage of AdInfuse, which apparently is taking phone call data directly from carriers in order to create profiles of consumers that can be used for ad targeting. The VentureBeat article says that AdInfuse believes that consumers “will be less sensitive about privacy issues on phones”. Really? Consumers are already fairly insensitive about privacy online, but I struggle to see them being as freewheeling when it comes to a device that is physically with them at least two thirds of their lives. Mashable asks if scraping phone number records with a box at the carrier level leads to too creepy of an ad targeting solution. My position is, that the consumer should be made aware of the potential use of their data and should be asked to opt into it (not opt out). If it can lead to lower mobile phone bills or the freedom to get out of signing 2-year contracts to get the latest handset, many consumers will play along… but it should be their choice, fullstop.

I clicked over from a story on LeadCritic about an ABC News piece that featured Marc Diana of Leadpoint. Check it out and see what pre-roll video ad you get, because I got the weird one I screenshotted below, for Playtex bras. WTF? And the best thing about it - no way to skip the ad or even pause it! All I could do was mute it… how excellent these publishers are at knowing their audience eh?

One of the firms I work with uses various ad networks through Right Media, and this is a message we received today from Bannerconnect regarding the quality of ads that are showing up on our site. These networks daisy-chain themselves together and as such, sometimes have less control than they’d like about the particular ad types showing up on publisher sites. This says to me there have been some recent issue of note with publishers to warrant this:

Dear Bannerconnect members,

We’re always trying to increase the quality of our network. You as a publisher can help us improve the quality of the ads being served on your website. We like to receive feedback from our publishers regarding the quality of the ads we serve. If there are ads in rotation you don’t like or if you think they’re not suitable for your website, just let us know and we’ll remove them from your rotation. If you want to submit an ad for removal, it’s important to submit the Click URL of the ad in question. The Click URL of ads being served by Bannerconnect always start like this: http://ad.bannerconnect.net/click. For more information about how to grab the Click URL, check out our Publisher Handbook, which can be downloaded here: http://www.bannerconnect.net/network/downloads/p_handbook.zip.

We classify our ads in offer types and set up your account with full awareness of the offer types being suitable for your website (Admatch) , so the ad content should fit your site as close as possible. If you have any special requests regarding offer types, let us know so we can exclude certain types if they don’t fit your website. The following offer types are blocked by default in Bannerconnect network: Adult, Adware and Spyware.

One other thing to note, is that with sites being global, it’s really difficult to check the ads that are showing up for users in various different countries. One way of doing so is using TorPark, but it’s very slow and obviously not secure.

It appears that the latest monthly release of the NetRatings Adrelevance advertising numbers has a lot of people posting about whether an ad downturn is upon us or not, and how hard the mortgage fallout is hitting online publishers and ad companies. Which, according to CPM Advisors is a little odd given how unreliable the figures are. Interesting reading.

It just highlights to me the need for much better advertising spending tracking. The current information out there, is in a word, crap. [apologies to former employers and others in this relatively small community!]

With behavioral ad firm M&A happening at highish valuations, new behavioral advertising startups are able to raise a large amount of money. Like NebuAd, which has raised over $30 million in funding but inevitably faces privacy concerns since it operates at the ISP level and watches user packet traffic for signs of interesting behavior.

I feel like there are periodic privacy “episodes” that get privacy interest groups, the media and some consumers all worked up, but the reality is that the negative effects of these episodes is relatively small and short-lived. It’s often unfortunate, I feel, that there is such a short public attention span / memory.

I myself have not personally dug into NebuAd in any great detail (though it sounds like they’re at least trying to anonymize profiles… if that is entirely possible, probably not), but if past history is any guide, the consumer is probably not directly the one who will determine whether the privacy attention greatly affects their business plans…  in Silicon Valley where perception is such reality, small nasty incidents would more likely have larger impacts on their potential customer base. If the more sensitive consumers at potential advertiser, agency and publisher clients have problems with it, that’s more where the rubber will meet the road for their business.

I would rather work on one-sided network business models. It’s much easier if you just have to worry about the chicken OR the egg.Advertising is pricing attention in the inverse. That’s essentially what advertising is: interruption economics

The quest for ads that work better is an ongoing struggle as many of us have been all-too-privileged to be a part of (sarcastic harrumph)… and yet a large portion of advertising inventory these days goes to advertising networks whose fare is typically measured in millions if not billions of impressions. It’s freight, pure and simple. But in a world where the difference between a 0.2% and a 0.3% clickthrough rate can make or break campaigns and (mostly direct) media companies, you’ve got to figure that the successful networks will be ones who’re able to figure out how to better match advertising to sites in their network. A lot of focus has been on matching the content or context, but matching the look and feel or structure of the advertising content may have an even greater impact on conversion. Now realize that for most ad networks, they only have the ad unit as a bounded box to work inside of. There have been and will continue to be many innovations here, and there are also sometimes-maligned ad units that jump outside of those bounds, but for the basic flavor of ad network today it’s all about being the best “black box” for those little boxes.

So thinking about optimizing what ads to show, a problem some networks spend more time thinking about than others: what if it makes more sense to show “red ads” on my blog no matter what the subject matter, than it does to show ads about “online marketing” or some thematic consideration? What about the intersection of these various bits of information? Successful advertising is definitely about context-matching, it’s just that context has too-often been very narrowly defined. The canvas itself is an important bit of context not to lose sight of. And ad networks will need to distinguish themselves by focusing on a specific market niche, or being innovative in the types of ad units or publisher programs they can offer, or all of the above.

One other note: it’s great to run thousands of tests at the same time, but testing costs money. What we really need are predictive models that can predict ad performance a priori.  This is some of the territory I’m currently exploring: if you are interested in this, drop me a line at rob@ the name of this blog (.com).

Public service ads (PSAs) - these are what run on websites when they don’t have any paying ads to show. Now it’s pretty hard to not have *any* ad that will pay you at least a couple of cents per thousand impressions out there, so when you see these types of ads showing up a lot you have to ask a few questions of the site, if it’s monitoring and monetizing its ad inventory very well. In the attached picture, on Facebook, is a PSA and I’ve been seeing a lot there recently. I’m not a very high-volume Facebook user so I don’t expect its because their adserver thinks I’m a terrible non-person who shouldn’t get any paying ad shown to me. But seeing a lot of these like I am today leads me to question how seriously Facebook is treating it’s advertising business, and of course as I’ve asked before - whether it has to worry about it all.

Microsoft snapped up ADECN for an undisclosed amount. I actually missed the news and found out when I got a call from the company’s COO, Jeff Green. We’ve done some testing with ADECN, and I’ve found their UI to be quite good - I can’t really comment on the quality of traffic opportunities just yet as they still seem to be fairly small from most of the stuff I hear out there, but it’s a decent technology base with some customers. The acquisition would obviously not be anywhere near aQuantive or RightMedia valuation-wise…

It sounds like the Doubleclick offering will end up being more of a branded ad network than a true exchange - which leaves me thinking that there really is still room in this market for someone to build something big, the real question is getting traction. For now though, the GOOG-MSFT-YHOO lines seem drawn up, with MSFT lagging a bit. I still think right now Google is best positioned and would be in a much better position were they more focused on the display ad play .. but undoubtedly they’re there within 6 months.

Here’s a conversation I hate:

“I can get you a better CPM depending on your budget, how much can you spend?”

“I don’t know - it depends on how well the campaign works!?”

There are a few issues here: one is the transaction costs involved in establishing a media-buying relationship. The back and forth, the signing of IOs and all of that…. makes it hard to set something up when it can go away quickly. But the quintessential problem is that you have to test; I am happy to spend $20,000 on a site if it works but I’ll probably know that after I’ve spent between $200 and $2000…

And so it goes on, the endless batting back and forth between advertiser and publisher. Some of the things that interest me in helping to mitigate these issues — 1) automation of the ad managements and ad ops process, 2) more flexible campaigns (there needs to be some innovation here as well. e.g. credit check vs. prepayment - maybe give a small deposit, are there ways to automate reputation checking across multiple business partners?), 3) standardization of advertising metrics including publisher and inventory rankings… it’s time to innovate guys, if we want this medium to be different from the offline one!

I believe greater transparency in online advertising is inevitable. Google Adsense now allows you to see where your ad campaigns have actually run, on which sites you’ve been seeing impressions. Some of these stats turn out to be quite interesting for you to check out. Examining some of this data just goes to show you how much user attention MySpace captures (albeit diluted beyond words): I looked at some assorted campaigns recently that had shown from June 1 to July 18th approximately 8.3 million impressions on myspace.com — and they yielded a grand total of 212 clicks for $38. Wow. That’s a CPM of $0.0046 or just shy of half a cent! And keep in mind, you don’t get to show that many impressions if those impressions can get monetized a lot better by someone else. I recently saw on Adrelevance that about 10% of all ads they tracked for a recent month were designated as having been shown on MySpace.com… they’re the Wal-mart of online advertising it appears.

Just another piece of value-of-attention data: others will have much more interesting stuff I’m sure.

Adsdaq, TraffIQ and AdECN are more recent entrants to the game following on the heels of RightMedia. As I pointed out in a comment to Vinny Lingham’s posting, I fear these guys may be barking up the wrong tree. I have some very specific ideas on the matter that I won’t share here necessarily, but if you are interested in those thoughts give me a call.

When I’m on the road I do not watch much TV (the tendency to work lots of hours in the hotel room with high-speed access is irresistable and not necessarily in a good way!), but when I do watch a bit to break things up I am of course stuck trying to watch it without Tivo.

I almost forgot some of the really annoying things to put up with in this regard. One is a thought about why so often when an advertising break comes up on one channel and I flip to an adjacent channel, they are having an adbreak also! From a consumer perspective it seems to me that you would want to schedule your ad breaks to not coincide with the ad breaks of your adjacent channels so that I can always get to some content instead of flipping through ads. But it seems that this happens very often.

However if you think about it from the content producer’s perspective; they’d prefer all the ads to be on at the same time so the chance of you getting engrossed in the adjacent channel’s show during their ad break is reduced. The likelihood of you sticking with the original show is greater and thus they’re happy. Similar to that the other show/channel could take the same approach since they’d likely benefit for the same reason in terms of “hanging on” to their original audience. But they’d be less likely to steal over other channels’ audience.

So I guess it could work either way depending on your show’s starting audience, attractiveness of mid-show scenes (if this makes a difference probably not a huge one though for certain shows like Deal or No Deal this might be a significant factor) and the relative power of not only your main competitors at the same timeslot but also those on on the physically adjacent channels. Yikes, perhaps I’m thinking about it too much and just need to get back to my trusty (three) Tivo(s)!

I enjoyed the new Bond ‘007 movie (Casino Royale) when I saw it recently with a few exceptions (e.g. the disappointingly improbable but of course drama-filled poker scenes), but overall it beat my expectations after a longish run of pretty ho-hum fare from MGM. There was, however, a real nails-on-a-chalkboard scene on the train, when during the first scene where we meet Vesper (Eva Green) and she’s giving a thumbnail on Bond’s background given the way he dresses, she asks whether his “fancy” watch is a Rolex. He replies that no, “it’s an Omega” and she has a face-half-tilted eat-sh** smile and says “beautiful!”. This product placement was more blatant and jarring than would be a huge Heineken banner plastered on the train window draped just behind Bond’s ear. Ouch.

The second part of this post is about another blatant example of fakevertising I recently saw on American Airlines flying cross-country as I am wont to do quite often. You’ve seen these - it’s a travel show about the wonders of somewhere-or-other, but with an odd focus on a certain hotel chain’s properties. Hmmm I wonder, and yes at the end in the smallest of print especially hard to see on a plane it says the entire segment was paid for by Hilton Hotels, and that “some guests may have been paid to appear.” Sheesh - even if the selection of hotels to show in that area was biased towards just Hilton ones, at least they could have found some real guests who could give real testimonials? Seriously though, stuff like this that we’ve been exposed to for a long time in other channels makes payperpost seem more like what it is, a drop in the shill bucket.

I’d love to see some best practices propagated out there about drawing the line a little more firmly between ads and not-ads (airline shows and ads are a great case study in this given their captive audience base — CBS I’m sure gets a lot of incrementality out of their partnership with American Airlines I’d bet)… because the real insidiousness of this all is the non-conscious effects it has on our brand choices…. more to come on this in future posts I hope! Beware!

Great article about some of the perils of royalty-free non-exclusive stock photography: the image you use may end up running somewhere else for a similar product, a totally different product or (shudder) a competitor’s ad. I have faced this issue myself before… we were about to deploy an image of a woman typing on a laptop when we saw the same image staring back at us from the front page of Yahoo! in another company’s ad (they still use this image today). We pulled it and found another, though I won’t kid myself to think that it really matters all that much in the lead generation space. The examples in the article relate to better-known brands with pretty large footprints where it could get interesting.

Part of the problem here is the combination of some top stock-photo sources, the narrow range of choices when it comes to pictures with people in them (seriously) combined with the tendency for people to search using similar phrases and look for similar types of looks for their pictures. Perhaps not as much a lack of imagination as a desire for average-ness so as not to offend or make any particular group left out. And when they do, it’s done to shock or mix things up of course. It’s not that I’m waiting to see the bank that runs an ad featuring a biker with big tattoos and nose ring cozying up to their laptop to do online banking, but I do think we’re destined to muddle along with unimaginative stock photos for some time to come.

Apparently Yahoo! is ending the test that I blogged about here that had been eagerly taken up by lead generation players, namely the appending of third-party text advertising links to emails sent from free Yahoo! mail accounts. Despite some rumored great results for the advertisers (direct-response types, mostly in the mortgage, education and related leadgen verticals) there are concerns about the user experience and the program has for now, been shut off.